


The Familiar

by th_esaurus



Category: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Dreamfasting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 13:35:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20565209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: Rian looked terribly small against the endless plain. They all were, Brea thought unhappily, such little beings compared to the deep, ancient wonder of Thra. Would anyone be left to write books about them, after their deeds were done?





	The Familiar

**Author's Note:**

> set the night of the mourning song.

Sleep, like a silver coin in a pauper’s pocket, was hard to come by.

Brea could not settle on the hard desert stone. Vicious night winds and prickly sand had battered the outcrop for a hundred thousand trine and only served to smooth it down; her small body could never make it yield. She yearned for her bed. She missed her sisters, and her library, and her sense of place in the world; she missed her mother so painfully that it winded her, as though she were short of breath from grieving. But those were complex wounds. It was simple and selfish to miss her bed: to weep for a familiar comfort.

Brea turned again, found the rock just as painful under her right shoulder as her left, and sat up with a wet huff of frustration. 

There was a constant low light across the hostile savannah, the sleepy glow of the Three Sisters enough to make the crystal-flecked sand shimmer, if not quite sparkle. She had adored those moons as a childling, most of all the Pearl moon, a milky opaline orb that seemed at once weightless and unfathomably heavy, sometimes as solid as marble and sometimes appearing as though it were no more than a hole snicked neatly through the fabric of the night sky.

She had read, in Pallius’ Practical Astronomy (the fourth edition), that the Three Sisters were in fact part of a cluster, perhaps hundreds of moons encircling Thra, all of them too distant to be visible with the naked eye. 

This disappointed her for a while. She had liked to think of them as herself and her own sisters. The Hidden moon was Seladon, of course. Unknowable. 

But then fascination nudged aside her dissatisfaction, as it always did when she learnt something new.

Their little camp looked sad in the stark light. No blankets, just bodies in the clothes on their backs, curled around the smudgy ash of the dead firepit. There was a cruel nip in the night breeze that made Brea wrap her arms around herself, wishing she had more than delicate Vapran silks to warm her; Deet seemed unbothered by warmth nor cold, and Gurjin and Rian at least had their sturdy uniforms, hardy enough to see through a night’s patrol on the chill battlements.

Rian, she noticed, was gone. 

It didn’t alarm her. Sleepless too, Brea thought.

She stood, quiet and aching. Brushed away the coarse dust that had settled on her skirts. Lore - whom she suspected was not capable of sleep - lifted its great, strange head and looked at her curiously, ready perhaps to move on or fight, if it was called upon; but Brea simply put her finger to her lips and hoped Lore understood. Its head drooped slightly, swaying, and then it was still once more. 

Rian was not far. Sat upright and cross-legged on the folded rock that jutted out high above the shifting desert sands. He looked terribly small against the endless plain. They all were, Brea thought unhappily, such little beings compared to the deep, ancient wonder of Thra. Would anyone be left to write books about them, after their deeds were done?

Guilt settled like sediment in her belly. Rian must want to be alone, she thought, ashamed of her spying. But as she turned back to the camp—

“No,” he called softly. He was facing away from her and his voice was quiet and drifting. “Please, stay.”

“I’m not bothering you?”

“Not at all. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither,” Brea sighed. 

She settled next to him, her legs crossed like his, though it was not entirely comfortable. He wasn’t sat as near to the precipice as she’d thought, from a distance, and Brea was pleased; the drop intimidated her. Vapra was a valley city, low-lying and safely nestled among the mountains. She had always loved to fly low, through the cobbled streets, winding about curving houses and between the slalom-run of old pines that had grown like a wooden fence at the base of the outlying hills. At home, though, in the palace, up to the teetering throne room—

She always used the stairs. 

Rian seemed shy to look at her. 

It struck Brea that she did not know him at all. She felt a strangely natural comfort in his presence, felt that she could trust him with her life, but they had never had a single casual conversation. Brea could tell that he was older than she was, closer to Tavra’s age, and knew that he had Stone-in-the-Wood deep in his ancestry, but more than that was a mystery. She did not know whether he could read or write or play an instrument; she didn’t know what stories were his favourite to listen to, whether he preferred peachberries or lingonbread, how many times he had scraped his knees and elbows as a boy. She did not know the name of his dead father.

“I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly.

He seemed taken aback.

“What do you have to be sorry for?”

“Your father. We mourned my mother, but—”

Rian shook his head firmly. “Your mother was the All-Maudra. She deserved such ceremony.”

“But your father—”

Rian turned away from her. “I said words for him, when it happened.”

Brea felt the terrible urge to cry, and stifled it. She let out a shaky breath through her open mouth to calm her nerves. 

“Are you—”

She thought he would ask her if she was all right.

“...Are you the All-Maudra now, Brea?”

The shock of the question made her laugh. The naivety with which Rian asked it. He bristled at her bark of laughter, but grinned a second after, humble, clearly realising he’d misspoken. “No!” Brea said at once. “No. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mock. I’m the youngest of three, and it would be a very long time or a very sad circumstance that would crown _ me _ All-Maudra.”

Rian nudged her lightly with his shoulder, and the touch comforted her at once. “Remembering the nuances of Vapran politics wasn’t exactly high on my list of priorities,” he said, a friendly slyness in his voice. “Not when there was, you know, a dictatorship to overthrow.”

It was a bold joke, and Brea felt guilty laughing; but she laughed anyway.

Seladon was the All-Maudra, she remembered.

Brea quit her laughter. Echoes of it pealed out into the empty desert like cruel mimicry, and she was ashamed. 

Rian’s shoulder rested against hers fully now. She did not even feel him tense up when they heard the soft footstep on the rock behind them. Brea, too, was not alarmed. That same lack of fear when she saw that Rian had gone from the camp; it was only Deet.

It was strange how she knew. But she knew. 

“We didn’t mean to wake you,” Brea apologised.

“Oh no,” Deet said pleasantly. Her voice reminded Brea of the sound of bells - nothing like the harsh jingle that haunted her at the Order of Lesser Service, but something melodic and natural, like the song of a deep, cupped flower in a gentle rainstorm. “You didn’t. I just knew you were awake.”

She sat at Brea’s empty side, not minding at all that her knee brushed against Brea’s, and smiled across at them. “Ever since we met in the Dreamspace, I’ve felt connected to you both.”

She felt Rian’s bodily little jolt at that. 

“Haven’t you?” Deet asked, as though it were so obvious.

It wasn’t that Brea had never noticed it. Only that she’d never thought to voice it so simply. That calmness she felt around Rian and Deet, soothing when she was next to either of them, exponential when they were all three of them together. Something simply felt _ right _ about it. Rian nodded slowly as well, and Deet, always smiling, smiled wider. 

The desert wind chimed distantly through the old crystal formations stretching all the way out the horizon. It was unfamiliar music, but not unsettling. Brea watched Deet a while as she roved her gaze across the plains, her wide, black eyes seeing more than Brea herself could ever hope to in this dim light. There was an old Sifan shanty that she had heard once or twice when she was very young: that Grottan eyes were not eyes at all, but gems, obsidian, priceless if you could bring a pair to market. She had glimpsed Maudra Argot once, and for a time had been convinced of the legend: Argot wore a muslin blindfold and seemed to find her way about the palace corridors by sound, the tap-tap-tapping of her gnarled wooden walking stick guiding her to open doors and the feasting chamber. 

Brea, of course, had learnt in her reading that the Grottans were simply over-sensitive to the threefold light of Thra’s suns. She sulked at her own gullibility for a moment, and then marvelled at how curious Gelfling biology truly was.

“Do you miss the caves?” Rian asked, perhaps just for something to say.

Deet shrugged easily. “I miss my family. I miss things being familiar, I think. Everything up here is so new, and I like that, but it’s scary too. It’s like when you get a hole in your sock, you know? And you can darn it with new thread and patch it up just fine, but it’s not exactly the same sock. Something will always have changed. That’s how I feel about the caves now. That even when we fix everything,” _ when_, Brea noticed, not _ if_, “it won’t quite be the same. Will it?”

“I don’t know,” Rian admitted.

“I don’t think so,” Brea said softly. 

Deet nodded, firm and calm. “I think of my brother a lot, when I’m scared of the Topside. He used to have nightmares,” she went on, talking out as if she was telling the desert itself. “He had this terrible fear of the nurlocs. He would run and hide inside the house anytime he heard one loping around the caves. Our house is low down, you see, close to the bottommost tunnels, and he could hear the nurloc herd burring down there when they hibernate for winter. Silly,” she said fondly, though Brea thought this a rather sensible response for a child, as she had read in The Thraean Explorer’s Almanac that a dozy nurloc had a very poor sense of direction and had more than once caused minor cave-ins during Grot’s murky history. She did not point this out to Deet. “Anyway, Maudra Argot said the best thing for it was what she called _ exposure therapy _ \- to get Bobb’n face to face with the nurlocs and show how gentle they were. But nobody could get him close. He went into fits of weeping and wailing even at drawings of them. He was scared of the mouths, you see. So big they could swallow him up whole.” 

Rian, Brea noticed, shrugged pragmatically, as if he agreed. Deet did not notice, and it made Brea smile to herself.

“It got so bad he was almost home-bound. And then one evening, my fathers dreamfasted with him. Old memories from when they were childlings, how they had raced young nurlocs through the wide trading tunnels, dodging all the angry root merchants.” Deet giggled happily, clearly privy to this memory as well. “And when they were courting, out collecting shed nurloc wool to make each other new tunics. Both of them had the same idea, and got so grumpy at presenting each other the same gift. And I helped! I showed Bobb’n the time I heard the nurloc song, the one they hum after their long winter sleep to let us know spring is coming Topside.”

Deet took a satisfied breath, as though her storytelling had worn her out. “He wasn’t scared after that. I like to remember that, when things seem overwhelming. That we can grow out of fear, with the right help.”

Brea knew as little about Deet as she did Rian; but she had a gut-deep sense that Deet was wise. Not her own book-learnt curiosity, nor the blustering tutorial knowledge of the palace librarian - how deeply she missed him! His constant flitting and fussing about over her shoulder! - but an old and uncomplicated wisdom that lived in every creature on Thra, if only they cared to listen to its whispers. She had not yet settled her buzzing mind enough to hear this subtle song, but Deet, she thought. Deet knew the sound well.

Brea often thought of what part each of them had been born to play in this unhappy tale of theirs. Rian was the Warrior, of course. Brea liked to think of herself as the Scribe. She had, somewhat cruelly, thought of Deet at first as the Waif, all open innocence and otherworldly naivety. She wondered now if Deet was the Sage. The wisest of them all.

“Tavra often dreamfasted with me as a child,” Brea found herself saying. Her own voice startled her. “I wanted to know everything she got up to every day, as soon as she was old enough to join the paladin cadets. She would tut and laugh and say that all they did was run drills, but I begged her to show me. I wanted to know what happened in every part of the palace I wasn’t supposed to be in: the kitchens and the laundry rooms and the berrywine cellar, but most of all the sparring hall. So Tavra would huff and laugh and climb into bed with me, rolling her eyes but putting out her hand for me regardless. Seladon—”

She had been in full flow, but Brea stumbled.

Deet, attentive, put her palm softly on the back of Brea’s hand, where it rested on her knee.

“Seladon used to join us when we were very young. But once Mother began to involve her in meetings - she had to sit quietly at the back of the war room, you see, to learn about military strategy and clan politics - she would say it wasn’t proper to share like that. She got so haughty about it. Saying she knew far too important things to show us _ children_.”

Rian huffed a sad, chilly laugh. “She sounds like my father. He’d sooner dreamfast with his generals than with me.”

He fidgeted a little at Brea’s side, clearly feeling like it was his turn, now that the two of them had spoken so earnestly. Brea had half a mind to tell him it was perfectly alright to sit in their oddly comfortable silence, but selfishly, she wanted his words. She wanted very badly to know him and Deet both. 

“Mira used to—” Rian started. And then he stopped at once, hesitant. It was an intimate thing to share such memories, and perhaps he feared he might say too much. Deet’s hand still rested on Brea’s, and Brea echoed the gesture, holding her palm out in offering for Rian to take, if he wanted to. 

He did, clasping his fingers in hers, and she breathed out in relief.

He swallowed, and started again. “We slept in different barracks, obviously, the men and women of the guard. Mira was so cheeky, always trying to get us scheduled on night patrols together, and it worked once or twice until Gurjin spilled the beans - he _ claimed _ it was accidental - about us being—” He waved his hand vaguely. Brea understood - books had always been enough for her, no great interest in the boys or girls whose smiles lingered in her direction a little longer than unusual, but she was not ignorant. Deet looked curious, though, and Rian swallowed. “_Together_, you know,” he clarified, a little embarrassed. 

“Sometimes I wouldn’t see her properly for days. Just glimpses of her at the changing of the guard, or when duty was assigned. But she started coming to see me at night. She’d fly down to the boys’ barracks. It was stupid, really, she was stupid - if she’d been caught—but she never was. Her wings were always quieter than her feet. She’d flown everywhere as a childling, and never learnt to walk gracefully. She almost didn’t make it through basic training.” Rian laughed wetly at the memory, and Brea looked up to see him weeping quite silently. Her instinct was to avert her eyes, but she did not want to shame him for his tears. She clutched his hand, as Deet clutched hers, and let him cry; let him speak. 

“I had a corner bunk, right at the back. Always held my breath as she flitted inches above everyone else, all snoring away. We huddled under the covers so nobody could hear us. She’d demand to know why I was awake, she loved mocking me for not even being able to sleep without her. And then we’d—

“We’d dreamfast. In that tiny little cotbed. There wasn’t even enough room to lie face to face, she had to press her back into my chest and we’d hold our hands together like that. It wasn’t even proper dreamfasting, we were always so tired. Just sort of—hazy memories, of everything we’d been up to while we were apart. Nothing clear. It was just—warm, to feel Mira’s presence. Like she’d been there all along, in my mind. Sort of comforting.”

Rian fell silent and scratched the back of his ear awkwardly, done with his speech. His eyes were watery, catching the moonslight, but no more tears fell. 

“Thank you,” Deet said, ever so softly. Brea nodded. If anyone had asked her, she couldn’t describe why that - gratitude - was what she felt most of all, hearing their tales. But it was.

“I miss her so much,” Rian said, so angrily he almost spat. 

Brea had never thought missing so fiercely could weigh as heavily as it did. She had always thought an absence of something would feel like emptiness, but it was almost unfathomably dense, pressing against her shoulders. As though the Pearl moon she had loved as a child had clambered down from the sky and taken residence upon her back. A dead weight to be carried with every step she took. 

Suffice to say, she understood Rian’s helpless anger.

“Would it help?” Deet said suddenly. They turned to her. “If we did that?”

Brea felt Rian inhale sharply next to her, a ripple of shock. 

“Dreamfast, you mean? All three of us?”

“I’m entirely too tired to do it properly,” Deet laughed gently. “Perhaps it would help us sleep?”

It seemed like such a bold suggestion, and yet she said it so easily. Her smile was inexhaustibly kind; Brea didn’t think Deet would have minded in the slightest if Rian’s bashfulness got the best of him and he made blustery excuses why they shouldn’t.

“I _ am _ exhausted,” Brea admitted. She let it be whatever Rian needed: an excuse to refuse or a reason to accept.

“—Alright,” he said quietly. Nothing more, nothing less. 

It was no more comfortable here on the outcrop than on the rocks where they had made camp. Brea lay on her back at first, her silks bunched under her awkwardly, but as Deet settled down against her, she found it easy to shift, shuffling onto her hip to let Deet huddle into her back, trap what little warmth might come between them. Deet found her hand easily and clasped it once more, her arm a welcome weight across Brea’s waist. 

“Which way should I—?” Rian asked, rubbing the back of his neck, hesitant to kneel down.

“Whatever’s comfortable,” Brea replied diplomatically. 

He struggled to consider it. And then he huffed through his nose, as though telling himself off, and clambered down with them. To Brea’s surprise, he lay facing her - not quite touching her, not at first - although he closed his eyes as soon as he was settled, so as not to disquiet her with his gaze. She laid her other hand, palm up to the night sky, between their bodies, and Rian sought it blindly, clutching her with both hands. 

Deet let out a warm, quiet sigh as he held her. As though she too could feel his touch. 

“Like this?” Brea asked breathlessly.

“Yes,” Rian said, his eyes shut tight. “Just like this.”

And then, like a deep, open sigh at the end of a world-weary day, they fell into the dreamfast. 

*

If anyone had asked Brea, come morning, what memories they had shared, she would not, with any certainty, have been able to say. Nothing vital, she knew. Nothing important. It was more like a feeling, she would have said; warmth and colour, disconnected images, faces she knew and did not know, laughter, sorrow, forest dew and cavern musk, echoes of songs she had not heard for years and years or perhaps had never heard at all. It was like standing at the shore of a great lake, Deet holding her hand on one side and Rian on the other, all three of them simply letting the water lap at their bare ankles. Was that itself a memory? Or just the dream of one?

If anyone had asked Brea, she would not have been able to say very much at all about the dreamfast. Only that she woke with Deet’s arms wrapped warmly around her waist and Rian’s wet, even breath on her cheek, and that she knew, from the fact of waking, that she had slept well. 

It was, for the time being, enough.


End file.
